


freefall

by silkscrub



Category: Spider-Man (Comicverse), Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Guilt, Internal Conflict, Internal Monologue, It's Gonna Be May, Multi, Other, Self-Doubt, Swearing, There's no resolution oopsie, in which May considers everything and everyone, parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:41:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23998468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silkscrub/pseuds/silkscrub
Summary: (They'll find it will all be okay, in the end. But even as helplessness, hopelessness, and despair fades, a touch of regret always lingers in the loved ones of superheroes.)
Relationships: Ben Parker/May Parker (Spider-Man), May Parker & Everyone, May Parker & Grief, May Parker (Spider-Man) & Peter Parker, Miles Morales & May Parker (Spider-Man)
Kudos: 4





	freefall

As one might expect, not everyone in New York collectively grieved with May after Peter died.

It's not like these people disliked Peter, or that the shockwave of his death wasn't potent enough to affect them--it was that their pain manifested itself in bitterness towards May, rather than sympathy. That, or they never trusted her to begin with, and the confirmation bias encouraged them to ignore, even protest, gifts and other well-wishes that were sent her way. For every hundred heartfelt, handwritten note of sympathy or bouquet of flowers, there was one letter of hate mail.

It's important to stress that these people were in the minority, and mostly irrelevant to May. The weight of grief was easily leveraged by the millions of others who respected her duty as gardener of their most precious flower. Still, they weren't irrational. Peter died at 26, after all; nobody should die that young, so why shouldn't she be accountable for encouraging Spider-Man to exist? Moreover, why was it legal to let her raise a super-powered child in the first place? Never mind the fact that these same people were out crying like chickens for Spider-Man when there was even the slightest potential for danger, May still thought they had a point. But she did so rationally, in that she acknowledged the opinion, but never let it consume her. She was better than that.

May hasn't watched the news in over ten years. She didn't need to. She knew everything important lightyears before a word reached a single ear of the press. 

She reads the headline on the TV in front of her:

_SPIDER-MAN ORIGIN CONSPIRACY; DID MAY PARKER EXPLOIT NEPHEW AS MINOR FOR PERSONAL GAIN?_

Talk about throwing a curve! Not to mention the blunt disrespect; he hasn't been dead two months!

But here's the thing: as one might expect, Peter was a remarkably difficult child to raise.

He wasn't rowdy, loud, or at all disobedient. Quite the opposite. He was always righteous in his efforts to help people and thus afflict May with chronic tachycardia. When he was five, she found him hanging upside down from a tree, trapped and tangled and crying, the aftermath of a noble attempt to "rescue" their neighbor's cat gone wrong only when said cat lept down easily as soon as he had got up there. When he was ten, he punched a kid in the face--something he never, ever did before--for bullying Gwen, despite being a regular target of that same bully himself, as May would later discover. When he was seventeen, he skipped school to build radioactive weapons with Tony Stark to combat even _more_ radioactive weapons built by war criminals. So, you know. Heavy stuff.

He jumped in front of cars, threatened monsters twice his size, dove into burning buildings, all to satisfy an undying martyr complex that he didn't know he had. May just worked around it, because it was too deeply engraved in his psyche to do anything else.

Or, at least, she thought it was.

All things told, May did exploit Peter's talents. Maybe not for political points, but for the greater good of society. They worked together; she coached him through his emotions and enhanced his physical strength through her own engineering. She taught him to turn his anger into power, his empathy into productivity. She manipulated his entire reality so that it served his goals as a superhero. And nothing was safe, either. Their missions usually went like this:

1) May develops a convoluted plan.

2) Peter attempts to execute said plan.

3) May performs a series of mental gymnastics around the possibility he might die.

4) Peter lives.

5) Repeat.

Peter was a champion for the good in society before the mask made it public. He wouldn't give up on Spider-Man, because Spider-Man was everything he wanted to be. 

That wasn't.....it couldn't be.......because of her.

She grabs the remote and shuts off the TV.

Grief is the easy part. May is used to grief. Guilt? Not so much.

In the brief period of time between Peter's death and her discovery of the multiverse, May considered moving. Going upstate, out West, abroad, anywhere that didn't have Peter's face plastered on every surface and/or knew of his existence at all. If not to simply escape the feeling of absence, to pursue the more refined luxuries of life. Swim in the ocean. Drink a mimosa. Date again, just for the shits and giggles. Wander into the warm waters of retirement and rejuvenate her youth through indulgences she had denied herself for so long. A wife then mother then neither, God knows she earned it.

That idea flew out the window the minute she met Miles. She's doesn't get a choice to help him, just as he didn't choose to be bitten by the spider. They are indefinitely obligated to each other, with or without the mutual shadow of Peter's legacy lurking behind them.

Still, she can't resent him for it if she tries. It is an unmixed blessing that Miles is not only a delightful kid, but also maintains a healthy reluctance when it comes to high-stakes missions. He's introspective; he's hesitant. He pretends he isn't. More than anything else about him, May fears crushing that hope.

So whenever May feels overloaded with cruel injustices from the world, she thinks of how much worse he must feel. How much, much worse it will be for his family, when they find out. A fourteen year-old cursed with a death wish he cannot control.

(They'll find it will all be okay, in the end. But even as helplessness, hopelessness, and despair fades, a touch of regret always lingers in the loved ones of superheroes.)

Miles' convenience is exactly what makes this whole situation inconvenient. Miles fears death. Peter didn't. 

Peter had to be only sixteen when he got bit. Of course he had to be sixteen. May still took everything he said seriously, because trust is what gets your kids to be honest, and when your kid is a superhero, you better hope and pray he tells the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so God fucking help him. Peter was an awkward kid, but his earnestness preceded him. If Spider-Man had to live, he would live, and if Spider-Man had to die, he would die. That was the informal motto by which he lived, whether May liked it or not.

Now, she wasn't hard-wired to deal with the emotions of it all, but hardly anyone could be, and things really shift into perspective after experiencing all five levels of grief every single day for multiple years. That was her own sacrifice. Since Peter could never come close to reciprocating her support, she only demanded he try his hardest to survive.

When people find out she's associated with Miles, too, what will they think? The new Spider-Man is visibly younger and more physically fragile than the first. She cited privacy to escape at least four TV interviews, but that excuse only lasts for so long. Eventually, the public will grow suspicious of her motives, and not irrationally so; she was never so afflicted as to cry on camera. It will ask where she grieved, how and how long she grieved, if she even grieved at all, that heartless bitch, May Parker, why else is she training another kid so quickly after she killed the first one? The law will turn its eyes on her.

The threat of prison doesn't phase her; it's being convicted that she dreads. Law enforcement might know jack shit about the realm of super-powered vigilantes (they're just too stubborn to admit it), but they do have jurisdiction of what constitutes proper parenting.

She supposes it doesn't matter how old Peter was when he got powers. She raised him; she's more or less charged with his behavior at every age and stage. His death was the mathematical product of every action and inaction she had ever done. If things had been different, though, if he had been just a little older, maybe the world wouldn't know it too.

"If I infiltrate the terminal with the collider's energy vectors and compromise the encrypted safety protocol, it'll combust." Peter explained, pointing to the aforementioned spot May's monitor, which displayed of a detailed blueprint of the machine's structure. He spread his arms enthusiastically as to depict an explosion. "Boom! It's over!"

From her comfortable position in her desk chair, May sat up straight. "You're going inside the electric field?"

"Well, not the field itself," he assured her. "Just the source."

"That sounds worse," she commented.

"It's not dangerous," Peter said immediately. Then, he shrugged, dismissive. "I mean, probably not. I'll be fine. What matters is I _know how to do it_! I know how to shut it down!" He looked at her and beamed, rugged and excited, a 26 year-old toddler. In his last few years of life, his face was the spitting image of a younger Ben.

"By pulling a Bugorski? Sounds pretty stupid to me." Peter laughed at that, but May was serious.

"Well, obviously I won't stick my head in it," he replied.

"It doesn't matter _what_ you put in it. You know how dangerous inter-dimensional radiation is. It can't be worth the risk."

"It's not that bad. It's not painful." he argued. 

"But it's volatile. And it could do long-term damage. Haven't you thought about that?" 

Peter tilted his head in annoyance. "I can't avoid it. Don't you think the entire population of Brooklyn is worth me losing a nerve or two?" Like she said: undying martyr complex.

"Don't downplay this. The cavity is a hundred feet tall. You absolutely can avoid it." 

"Aunt May, you don't know this machine. It's so powerful--" 

"Which is exactly why touching the source will kill you!" Peter huffed in frustration, but didn't argue. 

They both knew May wouldn't stand for improvisation. Not again. 

"There has to be way to deactivate the system somewhere else. Maybe a keyhole in the wall in something..." she muttered, turning back to the screen. 

"It's a remote system." Peter pointed out. "There is no key."

She shot him a severe look.

"Then we'll make one."

**Author's Note:**

> sorry for the lack of a real ending lol. will I do chapter 2?? on this episode of top ten unsolved mysteries--


End file.
